Haste, Nature!  Raze yon shiftless halls,
      Where pride penurious bides,
    The while the richness of the hills
      Runs off to choke the tides;
    Where every negro cabin stood
      A freeman’s hearthside warm,
    And broad estates of bramble wood
      Expunge in many a farm!

    Fill and revive these fair arcades,
      O race to Freedom born! 
    The tinkling herds that roam the glades,
      The barge’s mellow horn,
    The lonesome sails that come and go
      Repeat the wish again: 
    The ardent river yearns to know
      Not memories, but MEN!

TELL-TALE FEET.

The din of the day is quiet now, and the street is deserted.  The last bacchanal reeled homeward an hour ago.  The most belated cabman has passed out of hearing.  The one poor wretch who comes nightly to the water-side has closed her complaint; I saw her shawl float over the parapet as she flung her lean arms against the sky and went down with a scream.  Here, in the busiest spot of the mightiest city, there is no human creature abroad; but footsteps are yet ringing on the desolateness.  They are heard only by me.  There are two of them; the first light, timorous, musical; the other harsh and heavy, as if shod with steel.  I recognize them with a thrill; for they have haunted me many years, and they are speaking to me now.  The one is soothing and pleading, and it implores me to write; but the second is like the striking of a revengeful knell.  “Confession and Pardon,” says the one; “Horror and Remorse,” echoes the other.  They tinkle and toll thus every midnight, when my hour of penance arrives and I have tried to register my story.  It is almost finished now.  Let me read the pages softly to myself: 

“My life has been a long career of suffering.  The elements, whose changes and combinations contribute to the pleasure of my species, have arrayed themselves against me.  I am fashioned so delicately that the every-day bustle of the world provokes exquisite and incessant pain.  Embodied like my fellows, my nerves are yet sensitive beyond girlishness, and my organs of sight, smell, and hearing are marvellously acute.  The inodorous elements are painfully odorous to me.  I can hear the subtlest processes in nature, and the densest darkness is radiant with mysterious lights.  My childhood was a protracted horror, and the noises of a great city in which I lived shattered and well-nigh crazed me.  In the dead calms I shuddered at the howling of winds.  I fancied that I could detect the gliding revolution of the earth, and hear the march of the moon in her attendant orbit.